Project description
From quantum fluid of light to photonic Mott insulator
In 2002, the observed phase transition from superfluid to Mott insulator in ultracold atomic quantum gases gave rise to experimental quantum simulation. However, quantum optics advances for detecting quantum fluctuations and entanglement cannot be applied. The pioneering ERC-funded MISTiQ-Light project will investigate a potential transition from superfluidity to a Mott insulator in strongly interacting photons. Innovative experimental manipulation will create conditions in which photons behave as a quantum fluid of light. The goal is to achieve the same phase transition as in ultracold atomic gases, with the emergence of a many-body state of light. The photonic Mott insulator will enable exploration of quantum effects and address scalability issues in photonics quantum technologies.
Objective
Photons are great carriers of information but they usually don’t interact with one another. Atoms interact but are hard to manipulate and do not benefit from the toolbox of quantum optics for detecting quantum fluctuations and entanglement.
Many approaches have been proposed to marry these two systems for quantum simulation of condensed matter with strongly interacting photons, but to date, the realization of large-scale synthetic materials made of optical photons is still missing.
My project targets this exciting goal, namely the creation of synthetic photonic matter. It relies on the original approach of engineering a quantum phase transition in a fluid of light.
Specifically, I will investigate the superfluid to Mott insulator transition for light propagating in a dense cold atomic cloud. Photons will acquire an effective mass due to the paraxial approximation and I will generate and tune the strong photon-photon interactions via a giant Kerr non-linearity induced by manipulating atomic coherences. In this regime, photons will behave as a quantum fluid of light and follow an evolution similar to ultracold atomic quantum gases.
My original hypothesis is that a fluid of light should undergo the same phase transition, driven by quantum fluctuations, as quantum gases do, and that a many-body state of light will emerge from this transition.
At the fundamental level, a Mott insulator state of light allows for exploring truly quantum effects such as the emergence of analogue of phase transition in non-equilibrium systems, the presence of quantum depletion and pre-thermal states and the entanglement dynamics in many-body systems.
On the applied side, a photonic Mott insulator is a giant source of single photons (or any Fock state) with potentially several hundreds of lattice sites delivering tunable photon number-states in parallel. It will be a game changer for scalability issues in photonics quantum technologies.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2022-COG
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75006 Paris
France
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